LP REVIEW: DANIEL JOHNSTON ‘SPACE DUCKS’

Many of us are familiar with the story by now. Been there, done that. Others pretty much skipped it and just bought the ‘Hi, How Are You?’ T-Shirt.

My staunchly atheistic Dad always warned me as a kid, NOT to fool around with the occult.

“You don’t believe in spirits Dad, you dick. Fuck it, let’s commune with Lucifer via the medium of this deck of playing cards.”

As I got older, I realised that he didn’t have to believe in anything, he’d just seen enough to know how easily a fertile mind could quicksand up to its nostrils in shit.

Despite having decoded this warning, I unwittingly waded into the disquieting tape hiss of Daniel Johnston’s expansive back catalogue around the same tender age he was swept away by the ‘Laughing Rapids’ of the aptly-named fairground ride he compered at Astroworld aged 22: ‘The River of No Return’…